Prologue

Our work is concerned with chapter 7 and chapter 8 of part 2.These two chapters tell us about two important events. One is that Winston dreamed again and he dreamed something about his mother and the other happening is that Winston and Julia went to  O'Brien’s and joined the Brotherhood - the organization against the party.

Characters

Winston (The Protagonist)

Julia (the Protagonist’s girl)

O’Brien (one of the members of the conspiration)

Martin (another member of the conspiration)

Settings

Winston’s house

O’Brien’s apartment.

Summary chapter 7

At the beginning of the 7^th chapter Winston and Julia wake up and Winston thinks about his dream, concerning his mother, his father, and the society of this period.

"He confesses that sometimes he feels that he had symbolically if not physically murdered his mother. After his father had been vaporized, his mother had struggled to feed Winston and his sister on her meager earnings. With the selfishness of childhood, Winston had tried to grab whatever was available, often refusing to listen to his mother when she told him to share with his sister. He had justified this by telling himself that he was hungry and that gave him a right to be selfish. One evening when they got a small piece of chocolate, he snatched the whole thing and ran away. He remembered seeing his mother hug his sister to her as he ran. He had never seen either of them again; when he came back they were gone. He did not know if they had gone away or were taken away and vaporized. And he had lived with that guilt for years.

But as Winston tells Julia, what really stayed with him was his other instinctive gesture of clasping the child to her. A refugee woman in the war propaganda film had done the same with her son when their boat was bombed. It would not save the children, but it was a gesture, which asserted maternal love.

Winston tells Julia that he does not want to be responsible for her death as well. She had a good reputation; she could probably survive if she stayed away from him. She refuses, saying that she wanted to be with him. And then she makes the crucial statement that while the thought police could make them confess by torturing them, they could not make them betray each other. One could be tortured into SAYING anything, but one could not be made to BELIEVE it. In other words, the thought police could not get inside you. Winston grabs on to this idea as a ray of hope."

( from http://www.online-literature.com/orwell/1984/40/ )

Then Winston talks to Julia about his idea to escape, alone, away from this situation. He wanted to escape alone because, if the Police had found them together,  they could have thought about a conspiration.

They fear they can be imprisoned and tortured, drugged so to reveal their thoughts about the conspiration.

"Again, dreams play an important role in unfolding Winston's needs and desires. The fact that the glass paperweight provides the setting for the dream, and his mother's gesture the event, indicates Winston's association of love with the past, which explains his longing for past times and attitudes. It is significant that he realizes that the proles‹hitherto regarded as contemptible and lowly‹are in some ways superior to himself and other Party members, because they have maintained their humanity and thus their fundamental dignity. He recalls his kicking of the severed human hand after the bomb blast with a new awareness of his own disrespect.

Winston's memory of the times right before he lost his mother act to elucidate the historical turbulence of the early Revolution as well as draw a line between past and present attitudes. A clearer picture of the dire economic situation of those days starts to emerge; Winston had suffered starvation and privation, and had lost his entire family unit, left to fend for himself at a very young age. This experience gives some clue to his desperate loneliness as an adult, and his perhaps contradictory survival instincts. In some way, his selfishness as a child can be seen as a symbol of the "ungrateful" revolutionaries rejecting the past, starving it. Additionally, the young Winston appears to embody the lack of love and human emotion that characterize 1984. The fact that later he yearns for these sensations of his past makes Winston a sort of bridge between the past and the present, one link in a chain being slowly destroyed by death as his generation and its memories die out.

Love, the clear antithesis to everything the Party stands for (witness the predominance of the word "Hate" in so many Party rituals), is almost a character of itself in the way it so thoroughly threads through the characters' lives. Winston's health, as has been noted, has improved since having someone to care for and talk to. Love binds him and Julia in a way that, as they discuss at the end of the chapter, cannot possibly be broken by the Party and its twisted, contrarily-named Ministry of Love. Winston equates the ability to feel love with the essence of being human, and believing this immutable and indeed untouchable, starts to feel more positively that in the end, he and Julia and anyone who loves will prevail."

( From http://www.gradesaver.com/ClassicNotes/Titles/1984/fullsumm.html)

Some relevant quotations

  "She had possessed a kind of nobility, a kind of purity simply because the standards that she obeyed were private ones. Her feelings are her own, and could not be altered from outside"

From this part we suppose that Winston’s mother may be a prole, and if she is not she is as well a woman who dreams of freedom. So we think Winston must have received the gene of freedom from her mother.

  "They could lay bare in the in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable"

These sentences say the truth. The party can know everything but your inner heart. It’s their deadly weakness.

Summary chapter 8

At the beginning of the 8^th chapter they go to O’Brien's apartment because they think that he belongs to the conspiration.

This place seems to be very rich, they are astounded by the luxury of the place.

They ask him to turn off the telescreen, and when O’Brien accepts  they know that O’Brien is a member of the conspiration.

So they decide to reveal their intentions.

O’Brien offers them some wine brought in by another member of the conspiration, Martin.

O’Brien confirms that the conspiration exists, Goldstein exists, too. He asks them if they are ready to kill people, to be killed and to change their identities for the conspiration.

They accept but they don’t want to be separated, anyway.

So, at the end of the chapter they decide to join the conspiration: they will receive a book containing all the instructions.

Julia goes away while Winston remains with O’Brien to know the last orders.

Then Winston goes away and O’Brien turns on the telescreen again.

Personal comments

In this part of the book finally Winston finds that conspiration is a real group, so he decides to join it in order to destroy this society.

He realizes that there are many people that take part in the conspiration like 0’Brien and Martin.

Goldstein is a real man, and is the leader of this group that is based on one and unbreakable idea: FREEDOM!

I think that it’s important to become conscious of a problem but it’s necessary to commit ourselves actively so to improve and solve a situation.

Some relevant quotations

  "More even than of strength, he gave an impression of confidence and of an understanding tinged by irony. However much in earnest he might be, he had nothing of the single-mindedness that belongs to a fanatic."

From these sentences, we can discover that the author’ mood is mordant. Then we can also know that O’Brien doesn’t like Julia and Winston, because he isn’t crazy against the party at all.

  "When he spoke of murder, suicide, venereal disease, amputated limbs, and altered faces, it was with a faint air of persiflage."

From this part, we can find that O’Brien despises the things above, we all think O’Brien despises the proles even. He isn’t a real prole!

  "But between the general aims that we are fighting for and the immediate tasks of the moment, you will never know anything .I tell you the Brotherhood exists, but I cannot tell you whether it numbers a hundred members"

We know that O’Brien is a loyal party member in the end. Therefore, we can suppose that he doesn’t tell Julia and Winston anything because he knows nothing.

 by Simone, Sara Lee, and Guan Meiqing (李瑞琪 关美清)